1.1.8-Alasse-irena
Brick!Club 1.1.8 Basically, the Bishop talks to a man who is a dick and tries to use atheism to excuse himself for being a dick. Case in point: Ah! sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine dream! This man is apparently incapable of producing reasons to be a good person other than a higher power forcing him. And he thought “the Jehovah hypothesis” produces “shallow people whose reasoning is hollow”. But I suspect many of us have heard and rejected the argument about there being no morality without God before, and one half-baked fictional character isn’t going to make me change my mind, so it may be more interesting to wonder what Hugo is actually trying to tell us here. it seems obvious that he doesn’t consider God the only surefire way to be moral. He doesn’t take belief in God as a sign of goodness or rightness for the rest of the book. (God may have offered Javert a pretty solid moral compass, but Hugo doesn’t consider it to be pointing the right way. I very much doubt that all the Amis are Christian, and Hugo considers them all good people, I think.) So what is he trying to get at here? (On an aside, what are “fas” and “nefas”? Anyone?) Commentary Sentientcitizen Re: fas and nefas, “fas” in Latin means, like, rightness/lawfullness, but with connotations of destiny/fate or divine law, so “fas and nafas” translates to something like “what is divinely ordained and what is not divinely ordained” or “what is permissible under divine law and what is not permissible under divine law”. Assuming that it’s Latin, anyways, and that I’m not just jumping to conclusions. Affirmednothing-deniednothing Well, this contains spoilers. And I’m on a phone. So, if you don’t want to get spoiled, I sincerely apologize and suggest you guys don’t read it. Well, this could have been a little foreshadowing on Hugo’s part, seeing as, well, the story kinda revolves around the fact the whole different aspects of Good and Evil and etc. For people like Myriel, we see that they find it better to do good in the name of an omnipresent being, following that omnipresent being’s example pf doing good (like, the forgiveness-candlesticks-valjean-thing). But, obviously, there ARE people who don’t go about doing good THAT way. Their idea of good could be fighting for freedom or stealing bread to save your sister’s kids or looking for an ex-convoct for, like, your life. I’m Catholic and I’m not entirely sure about the entire matter but, I guess if there’s an all-poweful God, he’s actually take a look into your motives. Like, if you think what you’re doing is for the Greater Good and succeeding is it just as good if you did something dick-headed or lied (COUGHCOUGHCOUGH) to authority FOR the Greater Good? And, like, the chapter’s saying that you shouldn’t find reasons for being a dick, rather, be a dick for goodness? I have no idea and have gotten myself confused. Alasse-irena (reply to Affirmednothing-deniednothing) Be a dick for goodness? I like it. Maybe I’ll take it as my motto, if I may. Affirmednothing-deniednothing (reply to Alasse-irena's reply) *snorts* Yes, well, I guess it’s all about ~\|¥=PERSPECTIVE=¥|/~ Pilferingapples (reply to Affirmednothing-deniednothing's reply) …You know, I was afraid, when I hit this chapter, that I might see some sort of reader-to-reader unpleasantness happening around the club. Instead everyone’s been super thoughtful and kind of hilarious? WELL DONE TEAM. (the Greater Good, oh dear, we even have our living statue to set off the mashup…) Cerberusia (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) fas and nefas are Latin: fas is divine law, and nefas its opposite (i.e. what is not permitted under divine law) - e.g. after Nero had Agrippina killed, he publicly smeared her name and declared her birthday among the ‘nefas’, ‘unholy’ days. As in Greek culture, Roman culture had this thing about the differences between divine law and human law (ius) and the question of what happened when the two came into conflict, complicated by their habit of deifying their Emperors (when they changed to that political system, obviously) - for a look at the Greek side of things, see Sophocles’ Antigone, because it’s brilliant. In the Aeneid, the particular phrase ‘fas et iura sinunt’ keeps popping up - ‘laws both human and divine permit it’ - which nicely shows the contrast. So yeah, basically fas and nefas are about what’s religiously permissible (and not).